


Only Shades of Grey

by ceralynn



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-05
Updated: 2015-03-05
Packaged: 2018-03-16 10:28:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3484850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceralynn/pseuds/ceralynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dennis' favourite colour</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only Shades of Grey

**Author's Note:**

> I named this after a Monkees song because I have lost control of my life.

The pre-school that the Reynolds end up sending their children to does not have much in the way of toys. The fingerpaint station has a limited collection of garish colours that chap Dennis' fingers when they dry, and the smell sends bile inching up his throat even before he has the vocabulary to articulate his discomfort. The markers are a cleaner alternative, but they're clumsy in Dennis' small fingers and half of their inks are running dry.

When Dennis finally finds crayons, it's something almost magical. The selection is still a loathsome parade of technicolour, but it includes a nubby black and a virgin white that catch his eye. He scribbles a shapeless dark form onto the page, taking up the white and colouring over the black, eyes lighting up at the change before his eyes.

Grey. Stately, elegant, the colour of majestic elephants and the pinstripes on his daddy's suits. He delights himself for years recreating Rorschach blots, Barbara blindly, highly praising him while Frank never sees the pictures to begin with.

The year before he enters kindergarten, a teacher's aid carries a box of No. 2 pencils into the classroom, doling them out among Dennis and his peers. These are what the big kids use, she explains, and Dennis makes his first tentative strokes over the paper. Instantly, he understands why the big kids use these, the colour of his Rorschachs flowing from the dull point. Every shape he creates seems important, looks grander, and Dennis is already excited for the adult world.

Crayons still hold special place in his heart, but by the end of the week, Dennis is the first child able to write his full name in graphite.

\--

Dennis has a charmed grade school experience. Every subject comes to him easy as pie, and as a result, he spends a lot of time doodling in class. His favourite thing to draw is a dark black bar in the margins, another, lighter bar an inch away, then fill in the space between them with a gradient.

The process makes him look very studious, very involved with his note-taking, and his grades reflect this perception, so his inattention is never called out. He draws other things, too; aimless shapes, animals, his own face on occasion. But the look, the process, even the way his mouth feels shaped around the word—gradient—leaves every page of his notes decorated in smudges.

\--

Years later when prom rolls around, Dennis chooses a slate grey suit with the pinstripes, pale powder blue accents drawing subtle attention to his lightly-lined eyes. He wants to ask out the boy in the grey RIOT shirt, but the right words, the right gesture never comes to him. It's just as well. Dennis knows the proposal would have failed.

The boy in the grey RIOT shirt appears on his doorstep on prom night nonetheless, wearing exactly that and begging Dennis for a ride there in exchange for a water bottle full of vodka he managed to sneak out of his house. Dennis smiles almost shyly and accepts, because he'll take what he can get.

\--

"So this is it, dude? Final product?"

"Yeah, pal. This is it."

Dennis leans against the door frame and stares into his room, at the boy in the grey RIOT shirt surveying the newly-painted grey room around him. Grey walls, grey furniture, grey bedspread over grey sheets. Mac turns back to him finally, face scrunched in that familiar way it does whenever he's baffled, the way it scrunches whenever Dennis suggests he stop huffing glue or drunk driving.

"I dunno, dude, it's kind of.." Monochromatic, he would say, if he knew the word. "I mean, are chicks really gonna wanna bang in here?"

"Of course they will," Dennis affirms. "It's stately. Classy. Makes the bangin' feel like a formal affair."

Mac gives it a moment's thought and nods, easily accepting the pomp and circumstance of hypothetically fucking Dennis, and Dennis tries not to notice how much the gesture warms his heart.

"Besides," he goes on. "You don't have room to talk. What's on your walls, bro? A single crucifix?"

Mac launches into a passionate defense of his beliefs, of the kind of women he'll be attracting with them and Dennis barely hears it, focusing instead on how the grey of Mac's t-shirt brings out the blush on his neck.


End file.
